WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is increasingly concerned about training by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards for the Houthi rebels in Yemen, where the Shi’ite militias continue to make territorial gains despite airstrikes by neighboring Saudi Arabia.

U.S. officials said Tehran’s direct involvement with the Houthis was limited but that U.S. intelligence assessments had concluded that Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps personnel were training and equipping Houthi units.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss security matters, expressed concern that the IRGC’s mission could include training the Houthis to use advanced weaponry they acquired after seizing Yemeni military bases.

Saudi Arabia, which launched aerial bombardments of Houthi forces this week, has said the militia was receiving extensive backing from Iran, the kingdom’s regional rival.

“We see … Iran playing a large role in supporting the Houthis,” Saudi ambassador to Washington Adel al-Jubeir told reporters on Thursday.

Asked about Jubeir’s accusations on Friday, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters: “We’ve expressed our previous concerns about the destabilizing impact that Iran is having on this particular situation. We continue to have those concerns.”

The Houthis, whose home territory is in northern Yemen, practice Shi’ite Islam, the majority faith in Iran.

In September, they seized Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, pushing aside President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. Last month, Hadi fled to the southern port city of Aden and on Friday traveled to Egypt for a summit of the Arab League in Sharm el-Sheikh.

U.S. officials have long debated the extent of Iran’s support for the Houthis. Some say the aid is largely opportunistic and not a top priority for Tehran at a time it is also backing Shi’ite militias in Iraq and supporting embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

A Houthi official told Reuters on Thursday that the group was prepared to confront the Saudi-led airstrikes without calling on Iran’s help.

“The Yemeni people are prepared to face this aggression without any foreign interference,” said Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, a Houthi politburo official.

The Saudis “cannot accept the idea of an Iranian-backed regime in control of Yemen, which is why they felt compelled to intervene the way they have,” British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said on Friday during a visit to Washington.

Jubeir, in his remarks to reporters, noted that the Houthis had seized sophisticated weapons, including ballistic missiles.

“It’s no secret,” he said, that the Iranians “are providing assistance and support to the Houthis, both political as well as militarily, as well as economic.”

“The first thing the Houthis did when they entered and occupied Sanaa was to free Iranian Revolutionary Guards operatives and Hezbollah operatives from the jails,” he said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States is losing an information war to Russia, Islamic State and other rivals, says a new report that calls for a strengthening in U.S. counter-propaganda efforts and an overhaul of the government’s international broadcasting arm.

The study is the latest to highlight problems in the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), a federal agency created in 1994 which also is tasked with maintaining a firewall between the State Department and government-funded news operations.

With an annual $730 million budget, the BBG runs U.S. government broadcasting to foreign audiences, including radio, television and digital efforts. Among them are the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, widely credited with countering Soviet influence behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

The report, seen by Reuters, is based on assessments from 30 foreign policy and public diplomacy professionals.

It does not advocate turning government-funded broadcasters into instruments of U.S. propaganda. But it argues that the political firewall separating them from U.S. national security agencies is “overblown,” and the broadcasters are not always in tune with U.S. foreign policy objectives.

“Competitors with anti-U.S. messaging are fomenting an information war – and winning – while U.S. international broadcasting is challenged to keep pace with competitors and changes in the media landscape,” it says.

“U.S. international communications strategy should be rebuilt from the ground up,” the report adds.

Despite a modest expansion of programming since Russia’s annexation of Crimea last year and backing of separatists in eastern Ukraine, Washington is being out-gunned by the Kremlin, Western diplomats, congressional aides and other experts said.

The Ukraine crisis is “the most serious challenge U.S. international broadcasting has faced since the fall of the Soviet Union,” said report co-author S. Enders Wimbush, a former BBG governor and director of Radio Liberty.

House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Ed Royce said this month, “Our nation is getting beat by (Russian President Vladimir) Putin propaganda and our international broadcasting is floundering. It’s unacceptable.”

Royce, a California Republican who sponsored legislation with bipartisan support to reform the BBG, issued his statement following the resignation this month of the agency’s CEO, Andrew Lack, after just six weeks on the job. Lack returned to NBC News, where he was president from 1993 to 2001.

Jeff Trimble, deputy director of the BBG’s International Broadcasting Bureau, said it has created or expanded 25 programs, mostly in the Russian language, since Russia moved into Crimea in February 2014.

The agency is asking Congress for an additional $15 million to counter Russia in the U.S. fiscal year that begins Oct. 1.

BBG says its audience in Ukraine, broadcast and online, has doubled since 2012, to 7.5 million people.

“UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD”

Still, Trimble cited what he called “a very uneven playing field” in the battle to inform and influence populations in Russia and its periphery.

Russia has blocked U.S. government broadcasts, and spends a reported $400 million to $500 million a year on foreign information efforts. The United States spends about $20 million annually on Russian language services, Trimble said.

“There’s no money. We’re Lichtenstein against what the Russians are spending,” said a Western diplomat who follows the issue closely and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Even the BBG’s supporters say its structure, mandated by the U.S. Congress over the years, is a hodgepodge that fosters duplication and hampers agility.

Some units, like the Voice of America, are federal entities, while others like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, are independent nonprofits that receive government grants. All but one of the nine-member BBG board serve part time, and a January 2013 State Department inspector general’s report found the board was “failing in its mandated duties.”

“It’s just a Frankenstein of a structure,” said one congressional official.

The Royce bill, which passed the House last year with bipartisan support but has not been taken up by the Senate, would create a new U.S. International Communications Agency, with a full-time CEO. The regional grantees would be consolidated in a new “Freedom News Network.”

The new report, written by Wimbush and former RFE/RL vice president Elizabeth Portale, quoted many of those it interviewed as saying the legislation does not go far enough.

“The general consensus was that no reform would likely go far enough to fix U.S. international broadcasting’s myriad challenges,” they wrote.

WASHINGTON/MIAMI (Reuters) – The December breakthrough that upended a half-century of U.S.-Cuba enmity has been portrayed as the fruit of 18 months of secret diplomacy.

But Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the process reveal a longer, painstakingly cautious quest by U.S. President Barack Obama and veteran Cuba specialists to forge the historic rapprochement.

As now-overt U.S.-Cuban negotiations continue this month, Reuters also has uncovered new details of how talks began and how they stalled in late 2013 during secret sessions in Canada. Senior administration officials and others also revealed how both countries sidelined their foreign policy bureaucracies and how Obama sought the Vatican’s blessing to pacify opponents.

Obama’s opening to Havana could help restore Washington’s influence in Latin America and give him a much-needed foreign policy success.

But the stop-and-start way the outreach unfolded, with deep mistrust on both sides, illustrates the obstacles Washington and Havana face to achieving a lasting detente.

Obama was not the first Democratic president to reach out to Cuba, but his attempt took advantage of – and carefully judged – a generational shift among Cuban-Americans that greatly reduced the political risks.

In a May 2008 speech to the conservative Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami, Obama set out a new policy allowing greater travel and remittances to Cuba for Cuban-Americans, though he added he would keep the embargo in place as leverage.

“Obama understood that the policy changes he was proposing in 2008 were popular in the Cuban-American community so he was not taking a real electoral risk,” said Dan Restrepo, then Obama’s top Latin America adviser.

Six months later, Obama was validated by an unexpectedly high 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote, and in 2012 he won 48 percent – a record for a Democrat.

With his final election over, Obama instructed aides in December 2012 to make Cuba a priority and “see how far we could push the envelope,” recalled Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Advisor who has played a central role in shaping Cuba policy.

Helping pave the way was an early 2013 visit to Miami by Obama’s top Latin American adviser Ricardo Zuniga. As a young specialist at the State Department he had contributed to a 2001 National Intelligence Estimate that, according to another former senior official who worked on it, marked the first such internal assessment that the economic embargo of Cuba had failed.

He met a representative of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, and young Cuban-Americans who, according to one person present, helped confirm the waning influence of older Cuban exiles who have traditionally supported the half-century-old embargo.

But the White House wasn’t certain. “I don’t think we ever reached a point where we thought we wouldn’t have to worry about the reaction in Miami,” a senior U.S. official said.

The White House quietly proposed back-channel talks to the Cubans in April 2013, after getting notice that Havana would be receptive, senior U.S. officials said.

Obama at first froze out the State Department in part due to concern that “vested interests” there were bent on perpetuating a confrontational approach, said a former senior U.S. official. Secretary of State John Kerry was informed of the talks only after it appeared they might be fruitful, officials said.

Cuban President Raul Castro operated secretly too. Josefina Vidal, head of U.S. affairs at Cuba’s foreign ministry, was cut out, two Americans close to the process said. Vidal could not be reached for comment.

The meetings began in June 2013 with familiar Cuban harangues about the embargo and other perceived wrongs. Rhodes used his relative youth to volley back.

“Part of the point was ‘Look I wasn’t even born when this policy was put in place … We want to hear and talk about the future’,” said Rhodes, 37.

The U.S. government had sent Gross, a USAID contractor, on risky missions to deliver communications equipment to Cuba’s Jewish community. His December 2009 arrest put Obama’s planned “new beginning” with Cuba on hold.

The secret talks were almost derailed by Havana’s steadfast demand that Obama swap the “Cuban Three,” a cell of Cuban spies convicted in Miami but considered heroes in Havana, for Gross.

Obama refused a straight trade because Washington denied Gross was a spy and the covert diplomacy stalled as 2013 ended.

Even as Obama and Castro shook hands at the Johannesburg memorial service for South African leader Nelson Mandela, the situation behind the scenes did not look very hopeful.

“The Cubans were dug in … And we did kind of get stuck on this,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes and Zuniga spent more than 70 hours negotiating with the Cubans, mostly at Canadian government facilities in Ottawa.

By late spring 2014, Gross’ friends and family grew alarmed over his physical and psychological state. The White House and the Cubans knew that if he died in prison, repairing relations would be left to another generation.

With Gross’ mother, Evelyn, dying of lung cancer, the U.S. government and his legal team launched an effort to convince the Cubans to grant him a furlough to see her.

That bid failed, despite an offer by Gross’s lawyer Scott Gilbert to sit in his jail cell as collateral.

But a turning point had occurred at a January 2014 meeting in Toronto. The Americans proposed – to the Cubans’ surprise – throwing Rolando Sarraff, a spy for Washington imprisoned in Cuba since 1995, into the deal, U.S. participants said.

The White House could claim it was a true “spy swap,” giving it political cover. But it took 11 more months to seal the deal.

Castro did not immediately agree to give up Sarraff, a cryptographer who Washington says helped it disrupt Cuban spy rings in the United States.

And Obama, stung by the outcry over his May 2014 exchange of five Taliban detainees for U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, was wary of another trade perceived as lopsided, according to people close to the situation.

He weighed other options, including having the Cubans plead guilty to the charges against them and be sentenced to time served, according to the people.

Gilbert worked with the Obama administration, but urged it to move faster. From his vantage point, the turning point came in April 2014, when it became clear key Obama officials would support a full commutation of the Cuban prisoners’ sentences.

“TEARS IN OUR EYES”

The last puzzle piece slid into place at a Feb. 2014 White House meeting with lawmakers including Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Sen. Dick Durbin.

Obama hammered home his opposition to a straight Gross-Cuban Three trade, two people present said. Durbin, in an interview, said he “raised the possibility of using the Vatican and the Pope as intermediaries.”

Pope Francis would bring the Catholic Church’s moral influence and his status as the first pontiff from Latin America. It was also protection against harsh critics such as Cuban-American Sen. Robert Menendez.

Leahy persuaded two Catholic cardinals to ask Francis to raise Cuba and the prisoners when he met Obama in March. The Pope did so, then wrote personal letters to Obama and Castro.

“What could be better than the president being be able to tell Menendez or anybody else, ‘Hey, The Pope asked me?’” a congressional aide said.

The deal was finalised in late October in Rome, where the U.S. and Cuban teams met separately with Vatican officials, then all three teams together.

Rhodes and Zuniga met the Cubans again in December to nail down logistics for the Dec. 17 announcements of prisoner releases, easing of U.S. sanctions, normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations and Cuba’s freeing of 53 political prisoners.

Gilbert was aboard the plane to Cuba that would bring Gross home. Landing at a military airfield, Gilbert met Cuban officials who had been in charge of Gross for five years. “Many of us from both countries had tears in our eyes,” Gilbert said.

Castro and Obama, whose Cuba policy still faces vocal opposition from anti-Castro lawmakers, will come face to face at next month’s Western Hemisphere summit in Panama. Aides have dared to imagine that Obama could be the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

WASHINGTON/MIAMI (Reuters) – The December breakthrough that upended a half-century of U.S.-Cuba enmity has been portrayed as the fruit of 18 months of secret diplomacy.

But Reuters interviews with more than a dozen people with direct knowledge of the process reveal a longer, painstakingly cautious quest by U.S. President Barack Obama and veteran Cuba specialists to forge the historic rapprochement.

As now-overt U.S.-Cuban negotiations continue this month, Reuters also has uncovered new details of how talks began and how they stalled in late 2013 during secret sessions in Canada. Senior administration officials and others also revealed how both countries sidelined their foreign policy bureaucracies and how Obama sought the Vatican’s blessing to pacify opponents.

Obama’s opening to Havana could help restore Washington’s influence in Latin America and give him a much-needed foreign policy success.

But the stop-and-start way the outreach unfolded, with deep mistrust on both sides, illustrates the obstacles Washington and Havana face to achieving a lasting detente.

Obama was not the first Democratic president to reach out to Cuba, but his attempt took advantage of – and carefully judged – a generational shift among Cuban-Americans that greatly reduced the political risks.

In a May 2008 speech to the conservative Cuban-American National Foundation in Miami, Obama set out a new policy allowing greater travel and remittances to Cuba for Cuban-Americans, though he added he would keep the embargo in place as leverage.

“Obama understood that the policy changes he was proposing in 2008 were popular in the Cuban-American community so he was not taking a real electoral risk,” said Dan Restrepo, then Obama’s top Latin America adviser.

Six months later, Obama was validated by an unexpectedly high 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote, and in 2012 he won 48 percent – a record for a Democrat.

With his final election over, Obama instructed aides in December 2012 to make Cuba a priority and “see how far we could push the envelope,” recalled Ben Rhodes, a Deputy National Security Advisor who has played a central role in shaping Cuba policy.

Helping pave the way was an early 2013 visit to Miami by Obama’s top Latin American adviser Ricardo Zuniga. As a young specialist at the State Department he had contributed to a 2001 National Intelligence Estimate that, according to another former senior official who worked on it, marked the first such internal assessment that the economic embargo of Cuba had failed.

He met a representative of the anti-Castro Cuban American National Foundation, and young Cuban-Americans who, according to one person present, helped confirm the waning influence of older Cuban exiles who have traditionally supported the half-century-old embargo.

But the White House wasn’t certain. “I don’t think we ever reached a point where we thought we wouldn’t have to worry about the reaction in Miami,” a senior U.S. official said.

The White House quietly proposed back-channel talks to the Cubans in April 2013, after getting notice that Havana would be receptive, senior U.S. officials said.

Obama at first froze out the State Department in part due to concern that “vested interests” there were bent on perpetuating a confrontational approach, said a former senior U.S. official. Secretary of State John Kerry was informed of the talks only after it appeared they might be fruitful, officials said.

Cuban President Raul Castro operated secretly too. Josefina Vidal, head of U.S. affairs at Cuba’s foreign ministry, was cut out, two Americans close to the process said. Vidal could not be reached for comment.

The meetings began in June 2013 with familiar Cuban harangues about the embargo and other perceived wrongs. Rhodes used his relative youth to volley back.

“Part of the point was ‘Look I wasn’t even born when this policy was put in place … We want to hear and talk about the future’,” said Rhodes, 37.

The U.S. government had sent Gross, a USAID contractor, on risky missions to deliver communications equipment to Cuba’s Jewish community. His December 2009 arrest put Obama’s planned “new beginning” with Cuba on hold.

The secret talks were almost derailed by Havana’s steadfast demand that Obama swap the “Cuban Three,” a cell of Cuban spies convicted in Miami but considered heroes in Havana, for Gross.

Obama refused a straight trade because Washington denied Gross was a spy and the covert diplomacy stalled as 2013 ended.

Even as Obama and Castro shook hands at the Johannesburg memorial service for South African leader Nelson Mandela, the situation behind the scenes did not look very hopeful.

“The Cubans were dug in … And we did kind of get stuck on this,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes and Zuniga spent more than 70 hours negotiating with the Cubans, mostly at Canadian government facilities in Ottawa.

By late spring 2014, Gross’ friends and family grew alarmed over his physical and psychological state. The White House and the Cubans knew that if he died in prison, repairing relations would be left to another generation.

With Gross’ mother, Evelyn, dying of lung cancer, the U.S. government and his legal team launched an effort to convince the Cubans to grant him a furlough to see her.

That bid failed, despite an offer by Gross’s lawyer Scott Gilbert to sit in his jail cell as collateral.

But a turning point had occurred at a January 2014 meeting in Toronto. The Americans proposed – to the Cubans’ surprise – throwing Rolando Sarraff, a spy for Washington imprisoned in Cuba since 1995, into the deal, U.S. participants said.

The White House could claim it was a true “spy swap,” giving it political cover. But it took 11 more months to seal the deal.

Castro did not immediately agree to give up Sarraff, a cryptographer who Washington says helped it disrupt Cuban spy rings in the United States.

And Obama, stung by the outcry over his May 2014 exchange of five Taliban detainees for U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, was wary of another trade perceived as lopsided, according to people close to the situation.

He weighed other options, including having the Cubans plead guilty to the charges against them and be sentenced to time served, according to the people.

Gilbert worked with the Obama administration, but urged it to move faster. From his vantage point, the turning point came in April 2014, when it became clear key Obama officials would support a full commutation of the Cuban prisoners’ sentences.

“TEARS IN OUR EYES”

The last puzzle piece slid into place at a Feb. 2014 White House meeting with lawmakers including Democratic Senators Patrick Leahy and Sen. Dick Durbin.

Obama hammered home his opposition to a straight Gross-Cuban Three trade, two people present said. Durbin, in an interview, said he “raised the possibility of using the Vatican and the Pope as intermediaries.”

Pope Francis would bring the Catholic Church’s moral influence and his status as the first pontiff from Latin America. It was also protection against harsh critics such as Cuban-American Sen. Robert Menendez.

Leahy persuaded two Catholic cardinals to ask Francis to raise Cuba and the prisoners when he met Obama in March. The Pope did so, then wrote personal letters to Obama and Castro.

“What could be better than the president being be able to tell Menendez or anybody else, ‘Hey, The Pope asked me?’” a congressional aide said.

The deal was finalized in late October in Rome, where the U.S. and Cuban teams met separately with Vatican officials, then all three teams together.

Rhodes and Zuniga met the Cubans again in December to nail down logistics for the Dec. 17 announcements of prisoner releases, easing of U.S. sanctions, normalization of U.S.-Cuba relations and Cuba’s freeing of 53 political prisoners.

Gilbert was aboard the plane to Cuba that would bring Gross home. Landing at a military airfield, Gilbert met Cuban officials who had been in charge of Gross for five years. “Many of us from both countries had tears in our eyes,” Gilbert said.

Castro and Obama, whose Cuba policy still faces vocal opposition from anti-Castro lawmakers, will come face to face at next month’s Western Hemisphere summit in Panama. Aides have dared to imagine that Obama could be the first U.S. president to visit Cuba since Calvin Coolidge in 1928.

HAVANA/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Cuba would agree to restore diplomatic relations with the United States in time for the April Summit of the Americas if Washington quickly and convincingly removes the Caribbean country from a list of state sponsors of terrorism, a senior Cuban official said on Wednesday.

Diplomatic ties were severed in 1961, and negotiators for the two longtime adversaries will meet in Washington on Friday, following up on the first round of talks held in Havana last month.

If the sides move fast enough, they could reopen embassies in each other’s capitals in time for the April 10-11 summit in Panama, where U.S. President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro could meet for the first time since agreeing on Dec. 17 to restore ties and exchange prisoners.

A senior Cuban official put the onus on Washington to first strike Cuba from the terrorism list, which can apply sanctions to banks doing business with the designated countries.

“It depends on what the United States does. It does not depend on Cuba,” Gustavo Machin, deputy director of U.S. affairs for the Cuban foreign ministry, told reporters on Wednesday. “It depends on whether we are really taken off the list of terrorist countries.”

In Washington, a senior U.S. State Department official said re-establishing diplomatic relations should not be tied to Cuba’s place on the terrorist list. If Cuba insists on linking them, it could delay restoring ties, the official suggested.

The official said a State Department review about whether to remove Cuba from the list will be completed “very soon,” in weeks at most.

“But we don’t think that should be linked to the restoration of diplomatic relations,” said the official, briefing reporters on condition of anonymity.

Obama would need to inform Congress of any decision to remove Cuba from the list, a notification that requires 45 days to become official, which is not enough time before the summit.

The American side has said Obama’s notification alone should be sufficient because Congress cannot overturn the president under current law.

“I cannot say today, right now, if the act of making the announcement would be a sufficient guarantee,” Machin said.

U.S. officials have shown a willingness to expedite the six-month review process and remove Cuba before the summit. Cuba was added in 1982, when it aided guerrilla movements during the Cold War.

The United States is insisting that as part of any accord, its diplomats have freedom to travel around Cuba and meet with a variety of Cubans, including dissidents.

The senior State Department official acknowledged it has been challenging to find a bank willing to handle diplomatic accounts in Washington for Cuba, which remains under a variety of U.S. sanctions.

“Both of us have to come to the table in the spirit of getting to an agreement on these things, and not putting so many obstacles in the way that are not linked directly to how we function as diplomats in each others countries,” the official said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The head of the National Security Agency refused to comment on Monday on reports that the U.S. government implants spyware on computer hard drives for surveillance purposes, saying “we fully comply with the law.”

U.S. Navy Admiral Michael Rogers was responding to reports that the NSA had embedded spyware in computers on a vast scale and that along with its British counterpart, had hacked into the world’s biggest manufacturer of cellphone SIM cards.

“Clearly I’m not going to get into the specifics of allegations. But the point I would make is, we fully comply with the law,” Rogers said at a Washington forum sponsored by the New America think-tank.

The Moscow-based security software maker Kaspersky Lab said last week that the NSA had figured out how to embed spy software deep within hard drives by Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba and other top manufacturers, giving the agency the means to eavesdrop on a majority of the world’s computers.

Another report, based on documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published by the Intercept site, said the U.S. agency and its British counterpart hacked into Gemalto, which produces SIM cards. That would potentially allow intelligence agencies to monitor the calls, texts and emails of billions of people, the report said. [ID:nL5N0VU1CG}

Rogers, whose agency has come under intense scrutiny since 2013 when Snowden exposed details of its widespread surveillance programs, said: “I am not going to chase every allegation out there. I don’t have time.”

Even as he declined comment on the reports of aggressive NSA operations, Rogers argued that U.S. intelligence, along with law enforcement agencies, needs the legal means to break strong encryption increasingly built into operating systems such as those of Apple or Google.

“Most of the debate that I’ve seen has been, ‘It’s all or nothing. It’s either total encryption or no encryption at all,’” Rogers said.

If a specific phone is being used to commit a crime or threaten national security, “can’t there be a legal framework for how we access that?” he asked.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government is creating a new agency to monitor cybersecurity threats, pooling and analyzing information on a spectrum of risks, a senior Obama administration official said on Tuesday.

The Cyber Threat Intelligence Integration Center (CTIIC) will be an “intelligence center that will ‘connect the dots’ between various cyber threats to the nation so that relevant departments and agencies are aware of these threats in as close to real time as possible,” the official said on condition of anonymity.

The Democratic president sees it as an area of cooperation with the Republican-led Congress.

Various federal agencies have cybersecurity components, including the National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security, the FBI and the CIA.

The Obama administration is trying to connect the agencies “so that there’s one belly button for the entire U.S. government,” Shawn Henry, president of CrowdStrike cybersecurity agency, said on the CBS “This Morning” program.

“That’s a good strategy. It’s important because there’s so many different pieces of intelligence coming in. You’ve got to collaborate and put it together,” he said.

The CTIIC will aim for “seamless intelligence flows among centers, including those responsible for sharing with the private sector,” the official said.

The White House counter terrorism coordinator, Lisa Monaco, will announce the new center in an address on Tuesday.

The Obama administration likens the new agency to the National Counterterrorism Center established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, following criticism that U.S. intelligence agencies were not communicating with each other.

It will have a similar broad focus of providing “integrated, all-source analysis” of threats, the official said.

“No existing agency has the responsibility for performing these functions, so we need these gaps to be filled to help the federal government meet its responsibilities in cybersecurity,” the official said.

Congress has tried for years to pass legislation to encourage companies to share data from cyberattacks with the government and each other, but efforts were stymied by liability issues and privacy concerns of citizens.

Last month, President Barack Obama proposed legislation to strike a balance, offering liability protection to companies that provide information in near real time to the government, while requiring them to strip it of personal data.

WASHINGTON/MUNICH (Reuters) – Russian-backed rebels’ violent offensive in eastern Ukraine leaves President Barack Obama with perplexing and urgent choices, but aides say he will exercise his typical caution in deciding his next move.

Should Obama provide lethal weaponry to the Western-backed Kiev government to staunch Europe’s worst conflict in two decades? Many U.S. lawmakers and some of Obama’s own advisors are calling for that step, but it risks igniting a proxy war with Russia and driving a wedge between Washington and western Europe.

Should he impose tougher sanctions on Russia? While sanctions have hurt the Russian economy, they have failed to deter President Vladimir Putin and it is unclear if they will do so in the future.

Or should he throw his full weight behind a revised German-French peace initiative, even though U.S. officials accuse Putin of shredding a prior cease-fire agreement signed in September?

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, say the president will weigh his options carefully and will not be rushed into a decision. Obama’s administration has faced criticism that it struggles to act decisively and project U.S vision at the height of foreign crises.

“The timetable is fluid. This is too important to make a snap decision,” one official said.

Obama meets on Monday at the White House with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who discussed the peace initiative with Putin on Friday and has made clear she opposes providing lethal arms to the Ukraine government.

Merkel, Putin and the leaders of France and Ukraine are due to meet on Wednesday for further peace talks.

With diplomacy in play, Obama seems unlikely to decide whether to authorize weapons for Ukraine right away. The U.S. and German leaders may find some common ground, however, on imposing further sanctions on Russia, which have been Obama’s main tool in the nearly year-old crisis.

Yet tough rhetoric from some Obama advisors has raised expectations of a stronger U.S. response.

“The Ukrainian people have a right to defend themselves,” Vice-President Joe Biden told a security conference in Munich on Saturday.

If history is a guide, however, Obama will refuse to be swayed by calls for swift action and rely on a small inner circle of advisors in reaching his decisions.

Obama set a ‘red line’ against the Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons, and drew fire for not following through with an implied military response after evidence of their use emerged.

Obama has avoided laying down such ‘red lines’ in Ukraine, but the pressure is clearly building up for more decisive action.

John Herbst, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006, said that Obama’s “cautious instincts have served him and our country reasonably well in the Middle East … but he’s applied that same approach to Ukraine, where it doesn’t make sense.”

The difference is, Herbst said, that while Washington has struggled to identify reliable allies in post-revolution Libya or in Syria, it has an “acceptable partner” in the pro-Western Kiev government.

Herbst, now at the Atlantic Council think tank, contributed to a report this month by former top U.S. officials which recommended providing weapons to the Kiev government and $1 billion annually over the next three years to upgrade its defense capabilities.

U.S. officials say Obama has recommendations on his desk outlining the pros and cons of supplying Ukraine with lethal arms, such as anti-tank weapons, small arms and ammunition.

Some of Obama’s top advisors, including Ashton Carter, his choice for new defense secretary, increasingly favor such an approach.

But Obama’s national security adviser, Susan Rice, signaled caution.

“RUSSIAN AGGRESSION”

“It’s something that’s under consideration,” she said on Friday about arming the Ukraine government. Rice added, though, that such a step would only be taken “in close consultation and in coordination with our partners, whose unity on this issue with us thus far has been a core element of our strength in responding to Russia’s aggression.”

When she meets Obama, Merkel, who has led the European Union response to the Ukraine crisis, is expected to voice European worries that arming Ukraine’s military will only escalate the bloodshed.

“I understand the debate but I believe that more weapons will not lead to the progress Ukraine needs. I really doubt that,” Merkel told the Munich conference on Saturday.

Opponents of arming Kiev say Putin will be able to more than match any escalation; advocates say the Russian leader risks increased casualties and discontent at home if he does so.

Merkel will bring with her a new peace initiative that U.S. officials say includes a roadmap for implementing the previous cease-fire deal, agreed in Minsk, Belarus, in September.

While not all the details of the new initiative are publicly known, the officials said it would widen a proposed buffer zone between the Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian forces.

Putin, U.S. officials said, has made further demands, including moving the cease-fire lines to reflect the rebels’ recent gains. Ukraine, the Europeans and Washington reject that and other Russian terms.

“The truth is I don’t think we know yet … how successful this effort will be,” a senior State Department official said of the renewed diplomacy. “There is a sense that there’s still some big issues left to be resolved.”

Stephen Pifer, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine now at the Brookings Institution, said Obama also could choose “a middle option” and significantly boost military assistance for Kiev, but stop short of supplying lethal weapons.

The United States last year committed more than $118 million in training and non-lethal equipment to help Ukrainian forces, of which about half has been delivered, said a State Department official who declined to be named.

This included defensive equipment such as night-vision devices, body armor, helmets, radios, counter-mortar radars, robots to dispose of explosives, military rations and first aid supplies.

Michael McFaul, who stepped down as U.S. ambassador to Moscow last year, predicted on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Obama would give Ukraine weapons, but that the East-West crisis over Ukraine will persist for months and even years. “I don’t see this resolving any time soon.”

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Islamic State’s burning to death of a captured Jordanian air force pilot is likely to harden Jordan’s position as a member of the U.S.-led coalition striking the militant group in Syria, U.S. officials said on Tuesday.

The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Jordan has not retrenched from the air campaign against Islamic State since the group captured pilot Mouath al-Kasaesbeh after his jet crashed in northeastern Syria in December.

One official said he expected al-Kasaesbeh’s killing “to have an electrifying effect” on Jordan.

But the campaign also poses risks for Jordan, where there are pockets of support for Islamic State and which has been keen not to trumpet its military role in a neighboring Arab country.

Islamic State released a video on Tuesday that appeared to show al-Kasaesbeh being burned alive. The video surfaced on the same day Jordan’s King Abdullah visited Washington, and the United States announced plans to boost annual aid to Jordan to $1 billion from $660 million.

“The Jordanians’ response to the brutal murder of their pilot is going to be strong and forceful, and the Jordanian response will be to be more engaged, not less engaged,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, among a group of lawmakers who met with the monarch.

“The King feels that the gloves are off,” Graham told Reuters.

Jordanian officials have indicated recently they may expand their role in the anti-IS battle, U.S. officials said, although what specific new help Amman might offer is unclear.

A fragile coalition of Arab states including Jordan has given U.S. President Barack Obama symbolic and practical backing in the air campaign against Islamic State in Syria.

Some of Washington’s European allies conduct airstrikes in Iraq, at Baghdad’s request, but have declined to do so in Syria.

“I don’t expect Jordan to pull out of the coalition at all. In fact, it will intensify the involvement,” said Marwan Muasher, a former deputy prime minister of Jordan and ambassador to Washington.

Muasher, a vice president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said Jordan would not send troops into Syria, but steps like intensifying airstrikes and intelligence-sharing were possible.

Former State Department counter-terrorism chief Daniel Benjamin said Islamic State’s use of extreme brutality is aimed more at attracting recruits – where it has seen some success -than splitting the coalition.

“Ultimately, though, the atrocities and the misgovernance of those under ISIS rule will turn the broader Muslim population more forcefully against it and strengthen the resolve of coalition members,” said Benjamin, now at Dartmouth University.

]]>http://blogs.reuters.com/warren-strobel/2015/02/03/u-s-hopes-pilots-murder-will-toughen-jordans-resolve/feed/0Perpetrators of violence in Nigeria will be denied visas for US -Kerryhttp://in.reuters.com/article/2015/01/25/nigeria-election-kerry-idINL6N0V40OG20150125?feedType=RSS&feedName=everything&virtualBrandChannel=11709
http://blogs.reuters.com/warren-strobel/2015/01/25/perpetrators-of-violence-in-nigeria-will-be-denied-visas-for-us-kerry/#commentsSun, 25 Jan 2015 17:19:58 +0000http://blogs.reuters.com/warren-strobel/?p=333By Warren Strobel

LAGOS, Jan 25 (Reuters) – The United States will deny entry
to anyone responsible for stoking violence during Nigeria’s
election next month, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said on
Sunday, while urging the government not to delay the poll.

Kerry was in Nigeria to urge its rival political camps to
respect the outcome of a Feb. 14 presidential election.
Washington is concerned that post-poll violence could undermine
the stability of Africa’s top oil producer and hamper efforts to
tackle the Islamist militants of Boko Haram.

“Given the stakes it’s absolutely critical that these
elections are conducted peacefully,” Kerry told reporters in the
commercial capital Lagos after meeting President Goodluck
Jonathan and main opposition rival Muhammadu Buhari.

In the last election in 2011, when Buhari lost to Jonathan,
three days of rioting killed more than 800 people and displaced
65,000.

“Nobody gains by violence, nobody gains by turning a
political disagreement into a killing spree … The proof will
be in the actions that are taken in the course of the election
and afterwards,” Kerry said.

Kerry’s visit highlights the stakes for Washington in what
is expected to be Nigeria’s closest election since its 1999
transition from military rule.

“Anyone who participates in, plans or calls for … violence
against the civilian population must be held accountable,
including by ineligibility for an American visa,” Kerry said.
“Perpatrators of such violence would not be welcome in the
United States of America.”

“It is imperative that Nigeria holds its elections on time,”
Kerry added, an apparent response to remarks from Nigeria’s
national security advisor Sambo Dasuki this week that the poll
should be delayed to allow more time to distribute voter cards.

He also phoned the electoral commission head Attahiru Jega
to ask him to ensure the poll is credible and not to let the
date slip, a State Department official who declined to be named.

Kerry said the United States remained committed to helping
Nigeria fight Boko Haram, which has killed thousands, kidnapped
hundreds and displaced over a million people during its campaign
to carve out an Islamic state in northeast Nigeria, Africa’s
most populous nation. How the election is conducted will affect
the U.S. ability to assist Nigeria, Kerry said.

Overnight Boko Haram attacked the main northeastern city of
Maiduguri, leading to hours of fighting before Nigerian troops
repelled the militants.